Click to enlarge.
Related reading — George Steiner's Fields of Force , on chess in Iceland, and . . .
The New Yorker , article by Sam Knight dated March 28, 2022 —
They went to Björk’s house. She cooked salmon.
She had seen “The Witch” and introduced Eggers
to Sjón, who had written a novel about seventeenth-
century witchcraft in Iceland. When he got home,
Eggers read Sjón’s books. “I was, like, this guy’s
a fucking magician,” Eggers said. “He sees all time,
in time, out of time.”
George Steiner on chess —
"… the common bond between chess, music, and mathematics
may, finally, be the absence of language."
— George Steiner, Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik ,
Viking hardcover, June 1974.
In memory of George Steiner, of Walter Tevis, and of B&B Smoke Shop,
corner of Third Ave. and Liberty St., Warren, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s,
where I purchased . . .
At that point in my life, language interested me more than chess.
But I can identify with the protagonist of Walter Tevis's Queen's Gambit ,
(the book, not the film) who visited a similar smoke shop in 1960 —
… There was a long rack of magazines behind her. When she
got the cigarettes, she turned and began looking. Senator
Kennedy’s picture was on the cover of Time and Newsweek :
he was running for President . . . .
. . . Walking home with the folded [chess] magazine tucked
securely against her flat belly she thought again about that
rook move Morphy hadn’t made. The magazine said
Morphy was “perhaps the most brilliant player in the
history of the game.” The rook could come to bishop seven,
and Black had better not take it with his knight because…
She stopped, halfway down the block. A dog was barking
somewhere, and across the street from her on a well-mowed
lawn two small boys were loudly playing tag. After the
second pawn moved to king knight five, then the remaining
rook could slide over, and if the black player took
the pawn, the bishop could uncover, and if he didn’t…
She closed her eyes. If he didn’t capture it, Morphy
could force a mate in two, starting with the bishop sacrificing
itself with a check. If he did take it, the white pawn
moved again, and then the bishop went the other way
and there was nothing Black could do. There it was. One
of the little boys across the street began crying. There was
nothing Black could do. The game would be over in
twenty-nine moves at least. The way it was in the book, it
had taken Paul Morphy thirty-six moves to win. He
hadn’t seen the move with the rook. But she had.
Overhead the sun shone in a blank blue sky. The dog
continued barking. The child wailed. Beth walked slowly
home and replayed the game. Her mind was as lucid as a
perfect, stunning diamond.
***
The title is adapted from that of George Steiner's book
Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik
(Published by Viking Adult on June 25, 1974.)
For fields of narrative force, see the previous post.
See as well a memorable review by the late Florence King
of the novel The Eight by Katherine Neville. An illustration
from that review (The New York Times , January 15, 1989) —
Related material: Closing the Circle (Log24, Sept. 24, 2009).
"Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung
unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache."
— Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Section 109
Related material —
"… the common bond between chess, music, and mathematics
may, finally, be the absence of language."
— George Steiner, Fields of Force: Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik ,
Viking hardcover, June 1974.
Force Field of Dreams
Metaphysics and chess in today’s New York Times Magazine:
Joss Whedon, creator of a new TV series —
“I’m a very hard-line, angry atheist” and
“I want to invade people’s dreams.”
Garry Kasparov on chess —
“When the computer sees forced lines,
it plays like God.”
Putting these quotations together, one is tempted to imagine God having a little game of chess with Whedon, along the lines suggested by C. S. Lewis:
As Lewis tells it the time had come for his “Adversary [as he was wont to speak of the God he had so earnestly sought to avoid] to make His final moves.” (C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1955, p. 216) Lewis called them “moves” because his life seemed like a chess match in which his pieces were spread all over the board in the most disadvantageous positions. The board was set for a checkmate….
For those who would like to imagine such a game (God vs. Whedon), the following may be helpful.
George Steiner has observed that
The common bond between chess, music, and mathematics may, finally, be the absence of language.
This quotation is apparently from
Fields of Force:
Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik. by George Steiner, Viking hardcover, June 1974.
George Steiner as quoted in a review of his book Grammars of Creation:
“I put forward the intuition, provisional and qualified, that the ‘language-animal’ we have been since ancient Greece so designated us, is undergoing mutation.”
The phrase “language-animal” is telling. A Google search reveals that it is by no means a common phrase, and that Steiner may have taken it from Heidegger. From another review, by Roger Kimball:
In ”Grammars of Creation,” for example, he tells us that ”the classical and Judaic ideal of man as ‘language animal,’ as uniquely defined by the dignity of speech . . . came to an end in the antilanguage of the death camps.”
This use of the Holocaust not only gives the appearance of establishing one’s credentials as a person of great moral gravity; it also stymies criticism. Who wants to risk the charge of insensitivity by objecting that the Holocaust had nothing to do with the ”ideal of man as ‘language animal’ ”?
Steiner has about as clear an idea of the difference between “classical” and “Judaic” ideals of man as did Michael Dukakis. (See my notes of September 9, 2002.)
Clearly what music, mathematics, and chess have in common is that they are activities based on pure form, not on language. Steiner is correct to that extent. The Greeks had, of course, an extremely strong sense of form, and, indeed, the foremost philosopher of the West, Plato, based his teachings on the notion of Forms. Jews, on the other hand, have based their culture mainly on stories… that is, on language rather than on form. The phrase “language-animal” sounds much more Jewish than Greek. Steiner is himself rather adept at the manipulation of language (and of people by means of language), but, while admiring form-based disciplines, is not particularly adept at them.
I would argue that developing a strong sense of form — of the sort required to, as Lewis would have it, play chess with God — does not require any “mutation,” but merely learning two very powerful non-Jewish approaches to thought and life: the Forms of Plato and the “archetypes” of Jung as exemplified by the 64 hexagrams of the 3,000-year-old Chinese classic, the I Ching.
For a picture of how these 64 Forms, or Hexagrams, might function as a chessboard,
Other relevant links:
“As you read, watch for patterns. Pay special attention to imagery that is geometric…”
and
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